The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Stories about young, white female victims are a ‘natural trope’ in American society

From Natalee Holloway to Shanann Watts

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August 24, 2018 at 10:50 a.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi.

Shanann Watts was a young mother of two, with a third on the way. When she went missing, along with her kids, local news outlets in Colorado interviewed her husband, Christopher Watts. He told Fox 31 he hoped “she is safe.” “The kids are my life,” he told Denver 7 ABC.

Shortly after his wife’s disappearance and his subsequent interviews, Christopher Watts was arrested and charged with murdering his wife and children.

The story attracted airtime on ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. The Washington Post, the New York Times and other newspapers have written stories about the grisly case; USA Today ran a live stream of Christopher Watts’s court appearance.

The intense interest raises a question: What makes this crime different from the many terrible crimes that don’t rate even a mention on the local news, much less the national kind? After all, there are approximately 15,000 homicides in the United States each year.

‘A natural trope’ in American society

Stories about young, white, female victims are “a natural trope” in American society, a variation of the classic “damsel in distress” tale that has been reinforced by movies, books and culture for centuries, said Zach Sommers, a sociologist at Northwestern University who specializes in criminal law.

The most well-known and intensely covered “true crime” stories of the past 20 or so years have featured someone similar to Shanann Watts, who was 34 at the time of her death. Whether as victims or alleged perpetrators, each high-profile case has featured a white woman of a certain age — typically teens to late 30s — from reasonably privileged circumstances.

The victims list includes Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and Hannah Anderson, among many others. Women such as Amanda Knox, Jodi Arias and Casey Anthony have been alleged perpetrators, too.

Viewers and readers relate to young white girls and women as “universal beings” in need of protection, Sommers said. “The audience is more able to think, ‘That could be my daughter, my sister, my neighbor.’ There’s a built-in emotional attachment.”

In a 2013 study of missing persons, Sommers compared national and local media coverage of missing people against the FBI’s missing-persons database; he found that African Americans received disproportionately less coverage than whites. Men also received disproportionately less coverage than women.

Using ‘social capital’ to garner attention

People with a high degree of “social capital” — that is, family and social connections — are better able to spread the word to the news media and others about a crime than those who are economically disadvantaged and isolated, said Michelle Jeanis, a criminologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the co-author of a 2016 study on missing-persons coverage.

Take the case of Mollie Tibbetts, which has also received considerable attention this summer The 20-year-old college student who went missing was found dead on Tuesday.

Jeanis contrasts the attention the Tibbitts case received this summer with that of Sebastian Husted, a 19-year-old Iowan missing since January. Tibbitts’s friends and family quickly distributed news of her disappearance this summer, drawing attention from local newspapers and TV stations, and eventually from national media outlets. Husted’s family, however, has lamented that they lacked the resources and community support to drum up similar attention for him.

Viewer attention

Network TV representatives declined to comment directly on their coverage decisions, describing them as internal matters. But privately, several made the same point, in effect justifying the coverage: The Watts story has attracted widespread interest among viewers.

“The viewer response has been overwhelming,” said one. “It’s not a typical run-of-the-mill crime story. It has a number of compelling elements for TV,” including a TV interview with Christopher Watts pleading for the safe return of his wife and daughters.

It would be easy to conclude that the news media is racially and economically biased in selecting which crimes to cover and which victims to portray, but the audience plays an important role, too, Jeanis said. The news media may create a skewed portrayal of victimhood, she said, but the audience rewards it and perpetuates it by responding to such portrayals time and again. “It’s hard to determine which is chicken and which is egg,” she said. “If there’s racial bias, who’s responsible for that?”